Collaboration & audio (Spam Mail #9)

Hi there,

PSA: A reminder that (for those of us not in Australia) we’re still in a pandemic and COVID-19 cases are rising. Wear masks, social distance, be sensible, be safe.

Enjoy the links and see you next time.

💩 Cool shit

Radioooo - A musical time machine.

Low←Tech Magazine - A solar powered website, which sometimes goes down if there’s not enough sun.

Fantasy UIs - Reviews of UIs from sci-fi films and TV shows.

Chartogne-Taillet Champagne - A wonderfully unique website. Navigate by moving through a beautifully illustrated map of different vineyards.

School or Prison - This is depressing and really makes you question a lot of things. Guess whether the image is of a school or a prison.

💎 Word gems

Committing to collaboration (Increment / Andrew Leonard)

This looks at the evolution of open source systems for software developers to collaborate. It stays pretty heavy in the tech world, but as we continue to work remotely there’s some ideas here that can be borrowed for other knowledge-based sectors like science and law.

A close look at three version control systems that debuted successively in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s—CVS, Subversion, and Git—provides ample support for the argument that the evolution of software development tools embraced by the open-source world was shaped by the needs of remote workers. Each new iteration of version control software made it easier for remote workers to write great software by overcoming obstacles that impeded collaboration. Broadly speaking, success was achieved by balancing two seemingly opposed design imperatives: ensuring equitable access to precise information about the state of a project and decentralizing control over the process of creation as much as possible.

Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It (Matthew Ball)

Audio mediums seem to be having a moment. Spotify has been investing in podcasting last year. More recently is the rise of a new audio-only social network, Clubhouse (a  mashup of Twitter and podcasts). It’s made me look back at this essay - which breaks down how technology changes the content of media and business models. Audio has been relatively stagnant compared to other media format. Maybe we’re starting to see some new innovations coming.

Over the past several decades, music has evolved stylistically and in genre, but music content itself has not been dramatically overhauled, expanded or reimagined as video games or TV series have been. More audio is produced and distributed today than ever before, but this growth lags that of other media categories (including text). And while audio is easier to access today, it does not reach a greater share of Americans today than it did 60 years ago. Recorded audio has added a third monetization model in the 21st century — subscriptions — but it did so in 2001 with XM Radio. And three is still well short of other categories. Since the mid-2000s, it has probably been easier to make, distribute and build an audience around a vlog or blog than a song.

Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies (Scientific American / Thomas Leo Ogren)

Trees are gendered. Is this new information for anybody else?

If a large tree growing in a highly congested city that is packed with vehicular traffic were a female tree, it would shed seeds that would be contaminated with these same “removed” toxins. No one eats these seeds though, so they pose little threat to us. But what if that same tree is a clonal male, and each year it sheds vast amounts of airborne pollen?

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